Row Zero and Viewport Data Streaming | Hacker News Reader

Row Zero and Viewport Data Streaming

digest.browsertech.com

39 pointspaulgb10 comments

I dimly recall someone told me this is how the Web version of Excel works, or used to work: a modified version of the core Excel code running on the server. Aside from performance, it was the only feasible way of making it 100% compatible with desktop Excel.

It may be true sometimes¹ but not universally, based on https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/differences-betwe....

"Some features work differently in a browser window than they do in Excel. In addition, some workbook features can prevent a workbook from being viewed in a browser window."

¹ "Different applications can be used to display a workbook in a browser window. Depending on how your environment is configured, you could be using Excel for the web (part of Office for the web), Excel Web App (part of Office Web Apps on premises), or Excel Services in SharePoint Server (on premises) to view a workbook in a browser window. An IT administrator makes this decision, and it can affect which capabilities are supported when viewing a workbook in a browser window."

Interesting article and at the bottom he mentions "You can try out Row Zero without signing up (I love when apps let you do that)." You know what, I love that too! Let me try it. Lets see how it does with the AWS EC2 Pricing List for us-east-1. 229Mb and 320k rows. To say it was shocking how fast it loaded might be an understatement. Google Sheets (although it looks like it has _much_ more functionality as far as spreadsheets go) absolutely chugs trying to load a third of this data.

Where can I get that 229MB file? Sounds like a fun test set.

If you install the awscli and configure it to connect to your account then "aws pricing list-price-lists --service-code AmazonEC2 --currency-code USD --effective-date <today>" to get the price-list ARN then "aws pricing get-price-list-file-url <arn> --file-format csv --region us-east-1" to get the URL to download it.

alternatively a direct download[1] https://pricing.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/offers/v1.0/aws/Amaz... [1] edit the link[1] was for east-2 prices, here are east-1 ec2 prices[2] https://pricing.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/offers/v1.0/aws/Amaz... [2]

> The team wrote the S3 file system, and that was kind of the first big mission critical Rust project at Amazon.

I didn't know S3 used Rust? Presumably that was a later project, the original S3 shipped in 2006 and Rust was a just-launched research project back then.

Anyone know anything more about how S3 uses Rust today?

They haven’t said specific details publicly, but yeah, it has for a few years now.

... or does "S3 file system" mean https://github.com/awslabs/mountpoint-s3 - a Rust project by AWS Labs that provides "a simple, high-throughput file client for mounting an Amazon S3 bucket as a local file system" ?

> We use Rust to deliver services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon CloudFront, and more.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/sustainability-with-...

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